When running the ScholarOne reports, we found that the "Reject and Resubmit" decision type is not considered as a hard "Reject" decision. The consequence of this is that if you want to look at "Time to Final Decision" reports, for example, the "Reject and Resubmit" decision is not considered to be final, and the report will include a much longer period of time than you would expect--reporting the time from the manuscript's original submission, for example, all the way through to its FINAL Reject or Accept decision--skipping over the Reject and Resubmit decision that occurred in between. This skews our data and makes many of the ScholarOne time-to and other reports irrelevant to us.
We would very much prefer it if ScholarOne Reports treated each new manuscript ID NUMBER as a separate manuscript. Manuscripts that have received a "Reject and Resubmit" decision should be counted completely separate from the resubmission of such manuscripts (under a completely new manuscript ID number) that follows. This would help our journal immensely. I have heard that this is an issue for some other journals, as well.
Hi Simone,
Many thanks for your comment.
I should have stated my meaning more clearly in my post. When I indicated that we wish the 'Reject and Resubmit' decision type would be configured as a hard 'Reject' decision, I was meaning solely in terms of the reporting (ScholarOne Reports). In other words, we wish that the Reports would treat each new manuscript ID number as a separate and distinct manuscript.
When a manuscript is submitted to the journal and rejected (but with encouragement to the authors to rework the manuscript and try submitting again)--a Reject and Resubmit decision--some authors may completely abandon the hope of getting their manuscript accepted to the journal, while others may submit their work very quickly, and yet others may take many months to accomplish the level of revisions needed to try again. For the purposes of calculating the average amount of time a manuscript takes to get published in our journal, we consider an author's response time in formulating a resubmission to be highly variable from one manuscript to another, and ultimately irrelevant. Instead, we consider the manuscript's resubmission date to be the beginning of a resubmitted manuscript's time-to publication. (Resubmissions, in this way, are very different from the much more streamlined revision process--and should be treated differently in the ScholarOne Reports.)
We recently spoke to Wiley's Systems Support Manager and discussed at some length the option (which you suggested) of coding the "Reject and Resubmit" decision type as an actual hard "Reject" decision. It became clear in that call that this would unfortunately be a very messy option, with authors having no place to enter feedback on reviewer comments and reviewers having no easy way to view the original submission of a manuscript. It became clear to us that this would not, unfortunately, be a viable option for our journal.
Any other feedback you may have is welcomed.
Sincerely,
Cheryl
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That's already possible. You will need to create a new decision term that does exactly this and make it a hard reject (even if you called it reject and resubmit.) It would then get a new number.
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